Amateur sleuth catches archives thief

Chance and a little detective work helped J. David Goldin catch a thief at the National Archives .

Jessica Anne Gresko/Associated Press

Chance and a little detective work helped J. David Goldin catch a thief at the National Archives .

WASHINGTON – When J. David Goldin saw the recorded interview of baseball great Babe Ruth for sale on eBay he knew something was wrong. There was only one original record of that 1937 interview of Ruth on a hunting trip, and Goldin had donated it to a government archive more than 30 years ago. Now someone was auctioning it off, the winning bid just $34.75.

“I took one look at the record label and I said, ‘holy smokes, that’s my record,’” said the retired radio engineer.

From his home in Connecticut, filled with antique radios and tape reels, Goldin launched an amateur sleuthing effort that helped uncover a thief ripping off the country’s most important repository of historical records. The heist turned out to be an inside job. The culprit was the recently retired head of the video and sound branch of the National Archives and Records Administration – the government agency entrusted with preserving such documents as the Declaration of Independence and Constitution.

This week, a judge in Maryland sentenced the thief, Leslie Charles Waffen, to a year and a half in prison and fined him $10,000. Waffen, who had worked at the National Archives for 40 years, acknowledged stealing thousands of sound recordings from the archive. Prosecutors said more than 1,000 were sold on eBay in thefts that started as early as 2001. The stolen recordings ranged from a recording of the 1948 World Series to an eyewitness report of the Hindenburg crash.

It was Goldin’s meticulous record-keeping and some sleuthing worthy of a modern-day detective drama, however, that brought Waffen to authorities’ attention and helped catch him.

The 69-year-old Goldin’s interest in radio began when he was a teenager. He taped his first broadcast at age 14 and studied radio production at New York University before working for CBS, NBC and other networks.

At the same time, he became passionate about preserving radio’s history. He started creating his own archive of sound recordings, in the early days storing records under the bed in his small apartment in the Bronx.

These days, Goldin has a computer catalog for sorting through his holdings, more than 100,000 programs in all. He paid to have the system custom designed for him in the 1980s and estimates he’s spent hundreds of thousands of dollars obtaining and archiving broadcasts. Rows of neatly organized boxes of tape reels fill the basement of his Sandy Hook, Conn., home, which he shares with his wife Joyce, three dogs and 917 antique radios.

Now retired, he spends his days preserving recordings by transferring them from their original metal, glass and plastic records to tape. He cleans up the sound with a bank of equipment that takes up part of his living room and makes his catalog available on his website. He says he has enough uncataloged recordings to last the rest of his life.

Once Goldin has listened to and copied the recordings, however, he doesn’t need the original discs. That’s one of the reasons why he asked the National Archive in the 1970s if it wanted the originals, most of them radio broadcasts from the 1930s and 1940s. The archive said yes, and Goldin donated thousands of recordings ranging from political speeches and interviews to Congressional hearings. Then, he says, he mostly forgot about them.

In September 2010, however, he typed one of his routine searches for records into eBay and saw the Babe Ruth recording for sale.

Goldin wasn’t sure what was happening. He wrote to the National Archives. Were they getting rid of old material? If so, he wanted his records back. He got a call a few days later. No, the archive hadn’t sold anything. The record was missing, and it seemed likely it had been stolen.

Goldin turned over the information he had, including documentation of his donation. He knew the eBay seller with the Ruth record was going by the name “hi-fi–gal” and lived in Rockville, Md.

Then Goldin did some detective work of his own. He ordered a different recording from “hi-fi–gal,” and when it arrived he traced the package’s return address. It came back as the home of Leslie Waffen, the man who had accepted Goldin’s donation to the Archives more than 30 years earlier.

“I was kind of puzzled at the beginning and then disappointed when I discovered it was Les Waffen,” said Goldin, who added the men hadn’t stayed in touch.

With that information and more, federal officials obtained a search warrant and raided Waffen’s home, carting away two truckloads of materials. Late last year, Waffen pleaded guilty to stealing government property. He and his lawyer have declined to talk to reporters.

Soon after his guilty plea, however, Waffen wrote an apology letter to friends and colleagues, saying he was “deeply ashamed and embarrassed” by his actions. But he denied that the records he took and sold, valued at more than $80,000, were “unique or of significant historical value.” Waffen said most of what he sold was considered duplicative or excess. In the 1980s, the archive had made copies of at least some of the recordings on reel to reel tapes, just as Goldin had.

On Thursday, Waffen told Judge Peter Messitte that he rationalized that some of the material he stole had been preserved in another form. He said his conduct was fueled by a sense of self-importance and an obsession with recordings, and he acknowledged he “gave in to the temptation.”

“I violated, personally, the archivists’ code of ethics,” he said.

The judge said Waffen stole unique and irreplaceable records, and his actions eroded the public’s trust in the National Archives. Getting all the recordings back could take years and may be impossible.